At the end of 1940, after Paris had fallen under German occupation, the spectacularly refined French composer Francis Poulenc made a musical setting of Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem “Sanglots,” or ...

On a performance by Paul Jacobs & the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, of the organ concerto by Francis Poulenc. In my forthcoming chronicle for the magazine, I have a ...

Fifty years ago today, French composer Francis Poulenc had a massive heart attack in his Paris apartment and died. He was only 64, but he left us with an assortment of durable music that still ...

You may think of the French composer Francis Poulenc as a witty neo-classicist, especially in his chamber music from the 1920s. But by the end of his life, the iconoclastic former member of Les Six ...

A review of Poulenc: A Biography by Roger Nichols. Poulenc’s personality in and outside his music is plumbed in Poulenc: A Biography by Roger Nichols, a celebrated British scholar. As a composer, ...

France’s Composer Francis Poulenc, 58, built a solid reputation as the composer of sophisticated vocal works, frothy, impudent ballets and opera such as Les Mamelles de Tirésias* which gaily urged its ...

Nothing was so amusing to French Composer Francis Poulenc as hearing his friends marvel at the quilt of contradictions that masked his music and his life. “I am half-monk, half-bounder,” he would say, ...

The title role in Francis Poulenc’s 1944 opera Les mamelles de Tiresias is not played by anyone onstage, but by the bag of balloons on director Dan Miller’s prop table. A pair of those balloons, ...

One of Poulenc’s friends described him as ‘moitié moine, moitié voyou’ (‘half monk, half guttersnipe’), which suits his physical appearance perfectly and goes halfway to describing his music. His face ...

As every agony aunt advises, the one thing not to do when a relationship ends is pick up the phone. Unless you want to apologise, reconcile, or lose every last shred of personal pride you have left, ...